Killer Cute: Hooded Pitohui.

Ah, spring is in the air! Flowers are blooming, the air is warm, and songbirds fill the air with music. What could possibly be more representative of spring than a brightly-colored songbird?

...a brightly-colored, poisonous songbird?!

This colorful little bird is a hooded pitohui (Pitohui dichorus). It is native to all places called "New Guinea," and quite common there. Both females and males have bright colors, so it's not like we can tell if that's a dude or a chick. Yes, that pun was intended; it's Easter.

And, yes, the songbird is poisonous. The hooded pitohui was one of the first documented poisonous birds, and is frequently touted as the most poisonous.

How does a songbird become poisonous? By eating lots and lots of poisonous beetles. The process is called bioaccumulation, and is roughly the same method by which DDT accumulated in various bird species during the 60's - only, well, more beneficial. It's virtually the same way that lorises and monarch butterflies become toxic.

This bird is going to KILL you.

The resulting poison works like a charm. It is a neurotoxin called homobatrachotoxin, and can be found in most places in or on the bird's body. Merely touching this bird causes tingling and numbness (nerve tampering). Imagine what eating this bird could do. No wonder they're labelled as "least concern."

Need more of a trip? These beetles are related to the same bugs that poison dart frogs (i.e. the little froggies so lethal that natives dip arrows in their poison) eat. The pitohui is a bird who thinks it's a poison dart frog. You thought you knew songbirds? Don't trust those bright colors. They might not be for mating.

Killer Cute: Hippos.

Picture a hippopotamus for a minute. The image that immediately came to mind was probably one of a cute, chubby animal with a wide snout, huge nostrils, tiny ears, and maybe even buck teeth. Often, they are colored in pastels, as if a chubby herbivore was not cartoony enough.

Even the CUTE hippos can kill you.

But wait. Remember, this is the week where "cute" meets "AAAHH WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN!"  That means that, yes, hippos have some insanely dark stories around them. Steve Irwin was able to tangle with crocs and venomous snakes, but would not go anywhere near hippos. That is the kind of nasty we are dealing with.

Oh my, has pop culture misinformed us about hippos. Virtually all that they have gotten right is that hippos (Hippopotamus amphibius)  are found in sub-Saharan Africa, and that the word "hippopotamus" means "river horse." They are also indeed herbivores despite being on this column. That cute, pudgy hippo is still a death machine waiting to happen, and it is not funny in the least.

If animals had stat cards like baseball players, we would be able to see that the hippo is not built for cuddles. It is a massive creature weighing around 8,000 pounds, capable of running 18 mph, and sporting teeth that would sent a pit bull whimpering into the nearest dark corner. Despite having no real armor, a hippo regularly takes damage from other hippos.  Not only are they tanks, they are mean, heavy tanks. Any human who gets between a hippo and her calf are in for a rude awakening. Then death.

Although a hippo could kill a person by simply by sitting, that is certainly not their weapon of choice. They have been known to capsize boats and, umm, bite people down to their torsos. Hippos have huge, powerful jaws with teeth that pierce a human exactly as well as a rail spike with a ton of power behind it. Vlad the Impaler and Genghis Khan would be proud.

Aside from having nasty tempers, hippos have a few other charming behaviors. As this little dog-bean will tell you, hippo sweat is pink. For a long time, people thought that hippos actually sweat blood; it's really more like a sunblock/disinfectant, and while that sounds like an excellent thing to find at your local Walgreen's, "Hippo Sweat Sunblock" would not leave the shelves. They need this disinfectant for several reasons including another lovely habit called a "dung shower." This is exactly what it sounds like: a hippo whirling dung around with its short tail, preferably over other hippos. And people wonder why hippos are never desired as pets.

Killer Cute: The Slow Loris, Revisited.

(Apologies on the lateness for this entry. I actually have no idea why this bugger took me so long. It feels like I've been a bit off-kilter since Florida. That said, this did provide an idea for the Easter theme week: Killer Cute.)

Hey, remember two years ago when this blog covered the super-cool, unique primate called the slow loris? In 2012, the BBC released a documentary with new information concerning this cute, cuddly YouTube star. It turns out several corrections need to be made to that old entry, but the meat of that documentary is enough to say "screw it, let's just do another entry."

First off, it turns out that slow lorises are not that slow. They, like the gremlins the documentary compares them to, hate bright lights, and move slower because of it. In actuality, they are lightning-fast furballs that can snatch any little thing that moves. That said, they are also more predatory than previously thought, although the fangs and forward-facing eyes should have been a giveaway.

The scientist in this video has one question on her mind: Why are lorises poisonous? It's a good question, seeing as lorises are the only venomous primates and among the very few venomous mammals. The "how" seems to come from the loris's diet, much like how monarch butterflies are poisonous because the larvae eat milkweed. The "why" is a lot harder to figure out, and almost enters the realm of horror movies.

Pygmy Slow Loris- it's even cuter when it's small!

It turns out that this venom has a number of purposes. One, again as with monarch butterflies, the venom makes the loris smell and taste awful. Two, it prevents wounds from healing, making anything it envenomates susceptible to infection and necrosis. Lorises can use the venom in male-to-male combat, meaning that any battle-damaged lorises will die sooner rather than later. Creepier still, Indonesian natives figured out that things that the loris touched didn't heal, so they opted to coat their battle blades in loris blood. They are more terrified of loris venom than snakebite, and we're talking about a rainforest island chain with more venomous snakes than the entire U.S. of A. Screw Houndoom's supposed eternal burns; that's chilling.

I am going to keeeel you.

The documentary also takes a heartbreaking look at an exotic pet market in Indonesia. Conditions in the trade are hot, cramped, and smelly. Lorises and other endangered species can be gotten for a song. All slow lorises are taken from the wild; the documentary would probably have shown us adorable, well-tended baby lorises had any been available.

While I personally do not agree with this treatment, I do see the trade in general as a sort of inevitability. It's silly to think that humans would not try to expand the possibilities of domesticating animals. Anyone who thinks "get a cat or dog" is the acceptable answer to any exotic pet query is kidding themselves; menageries go back at least as far as the European monarchy, and conditions of zoos and the like have gotten better, not worse, through repeated interaction with "wild" animals. We know more about handling animals than we did way back when.

Some animals make good pets; others do not. The slow loris sounds like it is firmly in the "not" category, being venomous, smelly, loud, and not able to breed in captivity. Don't let that adorable YouTube video fool you. There are plenty of other exotic mammals that have proven to breed in captivity, if not make great pets. Wolves and skunks have a better track record in that regard than slow lorises.

You know that Killer White Rabbit from Monty Python's Holy Grail? That's what the slow loris is, for real. It's a cute fuzzy thing that kills people. The natives know it as a lethal, mystical animal that is to be feared despite its cuteness, and occasionally trap it for tourists. Scientists treat it as a mysterious creature that we need to learn a lot more about. The rest of the world see it as nothing more than the most memetic animal since LOLCats. Could LOLris be up next on the horizon? Hopefully not.